Data Center & Virtualization

The other way of providing Data Center Interconnectivity besides OTV is VxLAN. VxLAN has ben developed through a few years and despite at the beginning was considered as a solution that enabled spanning VLANs across the single Data Center, nowadays is considered as a solution equal or even better to compare with OTV and enables…

Overlay Transport Virtualization is the technology that you may encounter, if you are going to span your Data Center across different geographical location with full retaining of layer 2 information. It literally enables you connectivity between 2 servers within the same Vlan that are placed far away of each other.

In the course of time the old-fashioned model od Data Center became unefficient especially when the model with the traffic from North-South (client-server)has changed itself to East-West (server-server) and demanding applications started to be “hungry” for more then Gigabit links bundled via Portchannel. Also the better redundancy with non blocking links has started to be…

Multiple Context on ASA provides the highest level of virtualization, within one single chassis we get 2 virtual firewalls. Each with separate Data and Plane Control. Idea similar to VRF but in Multiple Context we may share one interface between 2 contexts what makes its more sophisticated.

Spanning Tree Protocol is not a good idea especially if we take into consideration data center. Wasting of bandwith by blocking links in environement which demands the highest throughput, is not desirable. Virtual Port Channel feature sorts it out in simple and clever way.

Vmware vSphere offers two amazing solutions in regard to ensuring high availability. One of them is called High Availability and the second one Fault Tolerance feature. Both of them complement each other providing uninterrupted working of the virtual machines in cluster.

NX-OS that we may come across on Cisco Nexus switches provide very interesting feature which is called FabricPath. FabricPath has evolved from TRILL, consists in “layer 2 routing” and definitely is one od the most important feature in modern datacenter.

Data access method determines which way data exchange between compute system (host) and storage will be going through. There are 3 ways, completely different, with utilization of different mechanism and protocols. File, Block and Object level Storage access characterizes with different speed, reliability and efficiency. Moreover, they require completely different appliances, but sometimes they can be “merged”…

Both features mentioned in the title, play a special role and are very important when data center grows up, when new switches, hosts and virtual machines are needed. They allow us to expand SAN infrastructure (fabric) and not spend additional money by the way.

Backup is the keyword in case of data storage. Even the newest technologies deployed will not work out if one day turns out that some hard drives with crucial data don’t work, RAID may failed owing to the numbers of broken hard disks, your SAN has been destroyed or data have been accidentally (or not) permamently…

Hi! My name is Marcin. I live and work in Dublin (Ireland). I am keen on networking, virtualization, servers and everything what is linked with IT and this blog is just about that. Please, contact with me at admin(at)itbundle.net. All labs that you may find at my blog have been created with using of GNS3vm 2.x, CentOS, VMware 5.5. Enjoy reading, derive the knowledge, share its further and ...